2008-02-24

Fosdem 2008: Sunday

Yep, went back to fosdem today. First saw the LVM2 talk by Alasdair Kergon, very interesting (except for some demo's not working in his cvs). I learned some new command options like lvcreate vg1 -l25%FREE (use 25 percent of free space in the vg) and lvextend vg1/lvol1 -l+100%LV (grow 100 percent). He also talked abut the future of dmeventd being able to handle hot spares. And he renamed a vg with vgsplit.

Alasdair was still talking at 15h, so i left (probably only minutes before the applause)(yes, i hate being late) to go to Janson for the PackageKit talk by Richard Hughes. Again an interesting talk! Richard pointed out the most obvious flaws with current $linuxdistro application installers: "Not good enough for his mother/fiancée." The effort sounds similar to autopackage (but i'm not an expert). I do agree however that a cross linux and easy to use "add/remove programs" tool would be useful for end users. But who cares about end users ?

I stayed in the Janson for klik (application virtualization), but Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeiffe were unable to convince me. It sounds indeed like static linking of applications, a debate that ended years ago (dixit someone from the audience). I also have questions about application updates, and sharing data files between sandboxed applications. Their "i can use a thousand different animations in my" slideshow did not help their cause.

I finished fosdem in the debian devroom to get a feel of the debian community and their effort to get Lenny out in September 2008. Clearly the message in debian-world is more important than the presentation of the message. A black and white slideshow does get the job done! Imho they should have more releases (typing this on Sarge).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

klik is *not* like static linking: it does *not* bundle everything, but only those libs that cannot be expected to be part of the base system (i.e., LSB Desktop). So commonly used libraries (like GTK and KDE) are *not* bundled with every klik download. In fact, applications downloaded with klik can end up using less space than regularly installed ones due to the compression used. It's not like static linking, it's more like the Mac.

Paul Cobbaut said...

Dear Simon or Kurt, when i find the time, i'll take a deeper look at klik, and when i do i promise to blog my experiences.